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The paper
C. Fecher et al., “Cell-type-specific profiling of brain mitochondria reveals functional and molecular diversity,” Nat Neurosci, 22:1731–42, 2019.
For many years, Thomas Misgeld, a neuroscientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, has studied mitochondria, often in the context of neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases. One thing he’s learned is that mitochondria in different cells or cell types, or even in different parts of the same cell, can behave quite differently. “Mitochondria are not as uniform as I always thought,” Misgeld says.
He wanted to develop a tool to capture that diversity. Taking inspiration from a decade-old technology called RiboTag, developed by researchers at the University of Washington (UW) to isolate ribosomes, Misgeld’s approach involved creating a line of mutant mice called MitoTag. These animals carry a gene that encodes a mitochondrial outer membrane protein tagged with green fluorescent protein, but as with RiboTag, ...
